“Gate-keeping” is a term that actually originated in 1943, when Kurt Lewin coined it in his study Forces Behind Food Habits and Methods of Change to describe how Midwestern housewives effectively managed their families’ food consumption during World War 2. Housewives, who were the primary conduit for getting food from the marketplace to their families’ mouths, recognized that not all family members’ need for food had equal weight in making household food decisions, and thus those wives (who would typically shop for and prepare the food) “gated” what food resources came in and how they were distributed. That is to say, the original meaning of “gate-keeping” wasn’t just about setting up gates to keep people out of some sphere in which they didn’t merit admission; it was about how to distribute scarce resources within an already-gated community in which there wasn’t enough for everyone. It was about survival.

Today, gatekeeping is not only not about keeping people alive, but one could argue that in many cases it’s about denying access to scarce resources– professional, interpersonal, political, economic– that people need to survive. Who are the gatekeepers and how did they come to be so? By what right? On what authority? Those of us sitting outside, trying to get in, want to know.

In this episode, we discuss the following thinkers/texts/etc.:

• Kimberly Akimbo (the Broadway musical) and co-host Leigh’s tweet thread about it
• How to Blow Up a Pipeline (film, 2022)
• Andreas Malm, How to Blow Up a Pipeline (Verso Books, 2020)
• “Reviewer #2”
• “Woman Philosopher in the Twitter ‘Manosphere’ (or that light-hearted tweet that ended in r*ape threats)” (The Philosophers Cacoon)
• Gatekeeping theory
• The Twitter blue-check controversy
• Dr. Seuss, The Sneetches
• The data problem with credit score algorithms
• “Feedback loops” in machine learning systems
• Franz Kafka, “Before The Law”
• Understanding search engine optimization (SEO)
• How Google’s search algorithm (PageRank) works

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